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Comment by gosub100 | Hacker News Reader

I think that word is in the process of being re-defined. I see it used a lot in the context of older pop music or singers/bands that are no longer at their peak.

My own pet theory is that it's an evolution of speech towards "hardened" claims that you can't easily disagree with. You cannot disagree with "over/under-rated" because there's no official "rating" method. You cannot disagree with "vibes" because the source of a vibration is impossible to determine. They both allow a speaker to make a claim without evidence.

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> You cannot disagree with "over/under-rated" because there's no official "rating" method.

(A) That's not going to stop anyone; (B) the claim can easily be obviously false. For example, Taylor Swift is underrated.

We have here an example of problem (B); P versus NP is possibly the single most famous problem in computer science. It isn't underrated.

This is just me being bad at English. I now rewrote the first paragraph of the blog post to hopefully make it clear that I am just claiming that our nonstandard way of viewing P vs NP is underrated, not the problem itself. :)

(A) it's going to stop attacks, because people are learning and adapting to having their ideas challenged. it's easier to use weasel words than it is to study language and make a persuasive argument. Your claim is false.

(B) anything can be "obviously false" under contrived/extreme situations. try again with "Sting is underrated" and suddenly you can easily argue it either way. Try using an argument that doesn't rely on p-values being at the 3+ sigma levels, but of course you won't because you know that will invalidate your position.

Might be the clickbait treadmill, indeed, or algospeak. But it doesn't need an objective meaning to be treated that way. The word "literally" can no longer be trusted to mean "in a literal sense". It's frequently used as an intensifier.

> The word "literally" can no longer be trusted to mean "in a literal sense". It's frequently used as an intensifier.

It was ever thus.

See, for example, https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/25/96439

That's a bad case of gotcha linguistics.

Yeah was gonna say the same. As seen on a recent video: "Blondie is so underrated!"...

Though I guess for a lot of young people it feels like that, with none of their friends talking about such bands.

sounds similar to weasel words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word

There's another term, i'm sure, because politicians use it all the time; "I never said X" when it was very heavily implied, and the listener was led down the garden path to the conclusion, only to find out the conclusion is bitter and unpleasant. The speaker can say "oh, that's your own biases/misconceptions/dogma, i never said <something extremely specific>"

I'm in the weeds here, but a simple analogy would be: "I don't like sunny days without clouds or fog." and i say "why don't you like blue skies?" and they say "i never said that" when the salient points of a sunny day with no clouds or fog are 1) there's a sun, and 2) the sky is blue.

Prime example: "Collective Soul was such an under-rated band",

contradictory reply: "not at all, they were Grammy-nominated and had N number-one hits",

weasel reply: "that's not what I meant... lately they haven't been paid enough attention. way to miss the point, $NAME_CALLING".

It's a way to say "I like them" without having to refute anything other than supporting comments, aka a weasel-word.

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